Cheltenham Web Design and Drupal Development | Tigerfish Interactive

We use WAMP on a daily basis on our desktops for development purposes (I'd never recommend using it on live servers, its designed for development only). Trouble is it's been running like a dog for a long time, it finally got the better of me and I decided to do some research as to why.

The steps I took were a bit trial and error, but here's the run down of what worked for me.

Disable the status module
We tend to keep sites fairly up to date anyway as we use a shared all/modules folder, so we only need it active on one site. It's a pretty big overhead as it remotely checks modules on the Drupal.org servers periodically. If you don't absolutely need it, disable it.

Use the my-large.ini file
In your wamp/bin/mysql folder, rename the my.ini file to my-original.ini then rename the my-large.ini file to my.ini. The my-large.ini file is designed for systems with more memory and it can cache more and speed up database requests. (Remember to restart the mysql service).

Increase the realpath_cache_size
This is to do with opening a lot of files, not sure why it helps but it seemed to speed things up a bit. Set realpath_cache_size = 2M in your php.ini file.

Windows firewall!
Here's the thing that gave the biggest improvement, allow mysqld.exe through the windows firewall. You need to load your firewall settings, add the mysqld.exe as a program and allow it full access!

Here's to now having a speedy local Drupal install.

Update

MySQL DNS resolving
After some new folks started at Tiger Fish with clean installs we noticed that their local WAMP installs were running slowly also. Confusing, as some machines were fine. It turns out after a bit of trial and error that the remote MySQL server we all connect to was at fault.

By default MySQL will try and do reverse DNS lookups even if the remote machine is using an IP to connect. This can cause a large delay in connecting to the database for the first time. We figure that some machines had different settings for DNS handling so they were not affected.

The fix is pretty simple, on the remote MySQL server simply add the following switches to the [mysqld] section of your remote servers my.cnf file.

skip-name-resolve
skip-host-cache

Restart your MySQL service an all should be speedier. The one caveat of this is that you can never use a domain to connect to your database. i.e. username:password@mydomain.com.

Hope this helps some folks out there.